On Metacritic, a review aggregator, StarCraft II has scored 93 out of 100. But StarCraft II is one of the few games I will lose sleep over. None of those old friends have as much time to play as they used to. I still fondly remember the online StarCraft games I played with a small circle of friends and I’m looking forward to renewing those ties via StarCraft II, now that many of those friends have grown up and started their families. I am one of those millions of original fans who has played the sequel regularly since its debut. This discipline could very well pay off, as at least one analyst estimates that StarCraft II could generate $350 million in revenues this year for Blizzard and its parent company, Activision Blizzard. But it had the patience to do Starcraft II right, to experiment and start over, and to release the game only when it was clear that it was more fun than its predecessor. Blizzard certainly did not take 12 years to finish this game, as it had to use lots of resources to deal with the success of World of Warcraft. The game cements the reputation of its creator, Blizzard Entertainment, as the progenitor of outstanding entertainment in an age where it’s very easy to cut corners on game quality. Sales were brisk out of the gate, with more than 1.5 million players buying the game in its first two days. You can see waves of soldiers from above, but nothing up close. The graphics look beautiful, even though view is way above the battlefield action, in bird’s-eye-view style at an angle. You can theoretically play it on a much lesser machine. I played the game on a PC with a 3.2-gigahertz Intel processor and an Nvidia Fermi-based graphics card. StarCraft II is even better, in my opinion. It’s pretty simple, but the original StarCraft was well executed. Once you build up your defensive and offensive forces, you send swarms of attackers to overwhelm your enemy’s base. Then you spend those resources on buildings that manufacture your armed forces. This new game is squarely within the genre of real-time strategy, where you create units to collect resources. If you’re in the second wave of possible fans, the game is definitely worth your time. But I suspect there are a lot of gamers who haven’t tried it yet and are sitting on the fence. I’ve finished the single-player campaign over a leisurely pace in the past month, and I am also busy playing multiplayer sessions. Most other games, including those that have sold more units than the 11 million StarCraft has sold, hit the dust bin after about six months of play or less. So long after its launch, it is still the equivalent of a national sport in South Korea, where professional gamers compete in tournaments on national TV. StarCraft has a special cult of followers that no other game can claim to have. These poor gamers, including me, have been stuck in the video game equivalent of Waiting for Godot, enduring the longest of waits for the best of all games. The sequel to the original StarCraft came out 12 years after the first game debuted, so the game’s addicted players might be forgiven for their binge gaming. If you’ve noticed a drop in productivity among your workers lately, you might trace it back to the July 27 launch of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. Connect with top gaming leaders in Los Angeles at GamesBeat Summit 2023 this May 22-23.
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